


Nobody's Father

by orphan_account



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Post-Season/Series 02, backstory speculation, past angst, present fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-07
Updated: 2015-06-07
Packaged: 2018-04-03 00:11:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4079185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>I never believed that we had a future.</i>
</p>
<p>Marcus Kane was a pessimist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nobody's Father

"It's the eighth this week alone." She removes her sweater and folds it carefully. "The way things are going we'll be looking at the start of a baby boom in about six months." 

 

She can feel him watching her from the bed as she finishes undressing and loosely braids her hair. When she looks up his eyes are dark and his expression thoughtful.

 

"The one year anniversary of the day the Ark came down."

 

"Seems likely. Celebrating life by... creating new life." She crosses the room and extinguishes the light before climbing into bed beside him. It's become familiar, far more quickly than she'd have thought possible.

 

"Can you cope with all those births so close together?"

 

"I'm not the one giving birth."

 

"Ha ha." He nudges her with his foot.

 

"Seriously though, it should be fine. Obviously, there are no guarantees, but medical intervention won't be necessary in most cases." The night air is cold even through the blanket, and she moves closer to his warmth, slipping an arm across his stomach. "Some of these babies are going to be second children."

 

He slides an arm around her shoulder and she can feel his smile against the top of her head. "Brothers and sisters."

 

"Hard to imagine raising two children. I struggled with one."

 

"Clarke turned out fine."

 

He sounds defensive on her behalf, and she squeezes his torso in thanks as she thinks of her absent daughter.

 

Recent reports suggest that Clarke is in Polis. The details are sketchy at best, but the rumours have come from a reliable source. At least she knows that her daughter is still alive, even if there's no sign of her coming home.

 

"It's okay to be proud of her, Abby. All that strength and courage came from you."

 

She laughs. "From Jake, maybe."

 

"From both of you, and from herself." He sounds insistent. "I'd be proud of a daughter like that."

 

His words reawaken a long-forgotten curiosity.

 

"Why did you never-" But she stops. It's not fair to ask him that.

 

"It's okay. You can ask me anything."

 

She knows that he means it. In the past six months they've exchanged a lot in the confessional of their shared bed. It's easier, in the darkness, to talk about guilt, and shame, and the blood on their hands.

 

His heartbeat is steady beneath her cheek, his warmth seeping into her body at every point where their skin touches. Cocooned beneath the heavy winter blanket, it feels safe to broach a subject that would have been taboo on the Ark.

 

"You never had a child."

 

"And you want to know why." His voice sounds carefully devoid of emotion.

 

Maybe she shouldn't have asked. "You don't have to tell me."

 

"I don't mind." He sighs, his chest dipping beneath her as his exhaled breath whispers through her hair. "Callie wanted a kid. Did the two of you never talk about it?"

 

"No." It saddens her to think of her dear friend, one of so many losses suffered in their last month in space. They never really had the time to mourn. "We were good friends, very good friends, but she never raised the subject. I'd see her looking at Clarke sometimes..." Looking back she thinks it was wistfulness in Callie's expression. "I never asked because it would have felt like prying. Kids could be a touchy subject, even between friends."

 

"Mm. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. It was difficult even between the two of us. We argued every time we talked about it. She wanted a kid. I didn't. The worst thing was, I could never tell her why. She kept pushing me to give her a reason. I think she thought she could change my mind, but I thought I was protecting her by keeping her in the dark. She deserved better. I did tell her that." He laughs, but there's no humour in the sound. "I told her that I'd understand if she wanted to end things, if she wanted to find somebody else who did want a child with her. For some reason, she chose to stay with me."

 

"She loved you." It's the one assurance she can give him. At the time she hadn't understood what Callie saw in Marcus.

 

(But at the time she hadn't loved him herself.)

 

"I loved her. I never..." He swallows audibly. "I never believed that we had a future."

 

"You and Callie?"

 

"No. The human race. I did some really terrible things to keep us alive, when I thought we were the only humans left. And even then, despite everything, I knew that we were only buying time. The Ark couldn't last forever. It wouldn't even last the few hundred years that we needed before humanity could return to the ground. Everything we did and everything we sacrificed only prolonged the inevitable. Even before the oxygen problem there was the lack of resources, the ageing equipment, the increasing population. Not to mention all the other little issues that we kept putting aside to deal with later. Life up there was unsustainable. So we brought in capital punishment for petty crime. We enforced a one child policy. We rationed everything from food and water, to medicine and clothing. They were discussing solutions long before either of us joined the Council. The first suggestion was always emptying the Sky Box. We were descending to the point of floating every so-called criminal, regardless of age."

 

"We would have found another way." But even as she says it, she knows that he's right. The Council had already voted in favour of ending the prisoner reviews even before the plan to send the kids to the ground was conceived.

 

" _You_ found another way. The rest of us weren't even looking. I was so sure that it was inevitable. I didn't even consider alternatives. I always knew that I'd have to float children one day. Maybe even my own. And I'd have done it, to preserve the human race." His voice cracks slightly as he whispers the confession. "That's the man I was up there. I decided a long time ago that I could never bring a child into that world."

 

"Do you think we were selfish?" She swallows around the lump in her throat. "Those of us that did?"

 

"No!" His arms tighten around her. "No, of course not. You still had hope. You still believed in a future. I envied that. But it was also what drove me. Those kids were the future of the human race, and that's what I was trying to save. I saw..." He pauses for a moment. "I saw the big picture. The future generations. But it meant that I couldn't get attached to little things like individual human lives. Not if I wanted to do what needed to be done. People called me cold and uncaring, and they were right. I cared about the future, at the expense of those around me in the present."

 

At the time she'd thought him cold and uncaring too. Now, from the security of his warm embrace and with the benefit of hindsight, she can see his point of view. It still sits uncomfortably on her conscience, but without the Draconian measures enforced by people like Marcus, the Ark probably wouldn't have survived for as long as it did.

 

"I just can't help wishing that I'd had a little more faith. When I was little, before I really understood life on the Ark, my mother taught me about the ground. She said that it would save us. We came from the ground, and we'd return to the ground. It seemed so simple. Then I learnt chemistry and physics and biology. I understood that humans weren't meant to live in space with just a thin sheet of metal between life and oblivion. I didn't just lose my faith, I went from one extreme to the other. I knew, with absolute certainty, that humanity would die in space. It got worse once I became Commander of the Guard and got elected to the Council. All those little secrets we carried... Not enough air. Not enough lifeboats."

 

She'd carried those secrets too, but she'd always believed that they could find a way around their problems.

 

"I had no idea. On the Ark, I didn't know that you felt that way." Her heart aches for that Marcus Kane, the cold, aloof commander who strode about the Ark never showing the weight he carried. She had hated him then, as much as anyone else. She hadn't realised that he was striving to save a future that he didn't believe could be saved.

 

"No one was supposed to know. I was the strong one, the ruthless one. I was the man who enforced the law so that I could save humanity, no matter the cost." She hears self-loathing in his voice. "Can you imagine what people would have thought if they'd known what little faith I had in the future?"

 

_I bear it so that they don't have to_. She remembers Bellamy's words -- _Clarke's_ words -- that she'd forced him to repeat again and again as she struggled to cope with her daughter's abrupt departure.

 

"That's why I could never tell anyone. That's why I couldn't give Callie a child, no matter how much she begged me to change my mind. It was selfish, really, but sometimes I looked at those little kids playing in the corridors and I thought about how one day they'd face the same problems we did. It would be worse for them. More urgent. More hopeless. I'd see parents raising their children, teaching them about life on the Ark.  I'd think, _yes, let_ your _children carry this burden_ , and I'd thank God that mine would never have to."

 

The pessimism and hopelessness in his outlook breaks her heart. She never saw it that way. When she and Jake had decided to have a child they'd thought about the life their baby would face. They’d discussed the dangers of bringing a new life into their artificially-sustained world, but in the end they’d decided that the benefits would far outweigh any risks. They were both optimists, she supposes, determined that humanity could prevail despite the odds stacked against them. 

 

Marcus shifts slightly beneath her. "In the end none of it mattered anyway. My mother was right. You were right. The ground saved us. Nothing I did made any difference, and now I just have to live with that." 

 

"We all did what we thought we had to, Marcus. You and me, Clarke and the kids, the Grounders, even the Mountain Men. Whether we were right or not." They've talked about this before, particularly after Mount Weather. There were never any good guys or bad guys, just flawed individuals trying to make the 'right' choice from a selection of wrong ones. It's the only way any of them can live with the things that they've done.

 

"I know that, but it doesn't always make it easier." One of his hands slides up her back, paying penance to the scars that he inflicted, while the other combs through her hair, gently working to destroy her braid. She knows he's soothing himself as much as her.

 

She thinks it's probably time to let the subject go, but she can't stop herself asking one more question. "Do you regret never taking the chance on a kid?"

 

His fingers are slow and steady in her hair as he separates the strands. She should complain because she'll wake up in a mess with her hair plastered across her face and in her mouth. She'll let him get away with it, as always, because the intimacy of the moment is worth any minor inconvenience the next morning.

 

"I've got more than enough regrets, Abby. That's not one of them."

 

She regrets it for him. She's seen him interact with the kids. She's watched him encouraging Bellamy's independence, respecting Octavia's strength, and counselling Clarke through difficult moments. She's pretty sure that he was the first of the Ark's adults to recognise and accept the transformation of the children they'd sent to the ground from juvenile delinquents to leaders. He shows them respect now, and gets respect in return. He made sure that there was a safe space within Camp Jaha for the younger kids to play, and she knows that he was the one who added toys and books to the list of supplies to be recovered from the enormous warehouses at Mount Weather.

 

He'd have made a good father.

 

"I'm nobody's father." He seems to pick up on her train of thought. "But sometimes I feel like they're all my children now. Those individual lives that I wouldn't let myself think about on the Ark are my responsibility. It's more than I deserve. It's more than enough."

 

She understands what he means. Councillors like Bellamy share the burden of running the camp, but as the eldest members of the Council, and as the Chancellor and the Commander of the Guard respectively, she and Marcus are still the overall leaders. She loves her people fiercely, despite her exasperation when she has to defend her decisions, or her anger when Marcus has to break up yet another fight. She watches their progress on the ground with pride, even as she worries constantly about how they’ll make it through the next winter. She loves the citizens of Camp Jaha unconditionally, and maybe they’re all her children too.

 

Since coming to the ground they’ve lurched from one crisis to another, barely having time to even think about the future. It’s different now. The impending baby boom is just the latest in a series of events showing how their people are settling in to life on the ground.

 

In time, she can see herself and Marcus falling into the role of village elders. The kids will take their places as leaders, and maybe, like the Grounder elders, her generation will look after the camp and mind the children while the hunters and warriors charge through the woods enjoying their youth and freedom.

 

In her hair, his fingers slow and then stop, destruction of the braid complete. His breathing becomes even as he drops off to sleep and she presses a soft kiss to his neck before closing her eyes.

 

She knows she’s getting ahead of herself. The fight isn't over, and there’s still work to be done if they want to reach that future.

 

(But she falls asleep dreaming of Marcus with silver hair and a white beard, his gnarled fingers cradling her equally wrinkled hand as they watch the future of humanity playing out before them.)

 

**End**


End file.
